As returns come in from the May 9 general election in the Philippines, voters have delivered Rodrigo Duterte a strong victory in the race to become their next president. But they also seem to have had last-minute doubts about handing the vice presidency to Ferdinand ‘BongBong’ Marcos, Jr.

Instead, defying polls throughout the campaign that gave Marcos a slight lead, the narrow winner (for now) is Maria Leonor ‘Leni’ Robredo, the candidate of the Partido Liberal ng Pilipinas (Liberal Party), which has governed the world’s 12th-most populous country for the last six years under Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino III. Under Aquino, whose father struggled (and was ultimately assassinated) in the fight for a democratic Philippines, the economy has grown at rates of 6% or even higher (barring relatively lower 3% growth in 2011).

Ferdinand ‘BongBong’ Marcos, Jr., the son of the former Philippine strongman, is trailing in vote counts. (Facebook)

With over 96% of the votes counted, Robredo led with 35.1% to just 34.6% for Marcos, a slim margin of around 215,000 votes, though observers believe that, based on the outstanding results, Marcos is unlikely to take the lead. That’s despite Marcos’s nearly two-to-one advantage in metropolitan Manila, which includes both the capital city and the even more populous Quezon City.

Already, Marcos is complaining about election irregularities. That must come as something of an ironic shock to the rest of the world, which considers the Marcos name to be virtually synonymous with kleptocracy. The family was implicated in last month’s sensational ‘Panama Papers’ scandal over offshore tax havens.

Robredo, who isn’t necessarily natural allies with Duterte, has indicated that she is willing to serve in a Duterte cabinet and, in turn, Duterte’s spokesperson has confirmed that he will offer a cabinet position to Robredo.

Fists in the air, Rodrigo Duterte is leading the polls to become the next president of the Philippines. (Facebook)

It’s hard not to think of Rodrigo Duterte as the Donald Trump of the Philippines.

But in truth, he’s more like Joseph Arpaio — a conservative, tough-on-crime kind of guy willing to do whatever it takes to clean up his city, human rights or the justice system be damned.

At age 71, ‘Rody’ Duterte, who has served for a total of 22 years as mayor of Davao City, has vaulted to a lead in the polls to become the leading presidential choice among voters in the Philippines when they go to the polls on May 9. It’s an election in which Philippines might turn from liberalism to illiberalism not only by electing a Duterte presidency, but also by supporting the restoration of the Marcos family — the son of Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s autocratic ruler from 1965 to 1986, is running for the vice presidency as well.

Duterte is a presidential candidate with tough talk on crime, corruption

Known domestically as the ‘punisher,’ Duterte is not a man to cross. He brags about killing criminals, especially drug dealers, with his own gun, taking extrajudicial justice into his own hands where he sees fit. He openly admitted last November to killing three rapists and kidnappers in Davao City, and he said last week that he would kill his own kids if he found out they were using drugs. Duterte has trekked across the country delivering a fiery nationalist stump speech, often with his fist raised in the air, a variant of which serves as his campaign logo. It’s not a subtle appeal Duterte is making to supporters, who also casually refer to him as ‘Duterte Harry.’

For the United States, the Philippines figures heavily in the growing US strategic and military interest in the Pacific Rim, and the outgoing Obama administration hopes that, in particular, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will draw the Philippines closer to the United States and further, economically speaking, from China. Today, officials in the administrations of both outgoing US president Barack Obama and outgoing Philippine president Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino III view the growing cooperation as mutually beneficial.

In no uncertain terms, a Duterte victory next Monday in the presidential election would make US-Philippine relations much more difficult.

It’s not a small matter. The Philippines is the world’s 12th-most populous country, with 103 million people and growing.

Davao City, the fourth largest in the country, lies in the far tropical south, and Duterte has presided over its transformation from a hub for communist and left-wing radicals to a case study in law and order. In a country where everyone seems to be worried most about corruption and crime, Duterte and reports of how he’s tamed Davao City over 20 years in power have captured the national zeitgeist. Elected to national office just once (18 years ago) throughout his decades-long career, Duterte can also style himself as an outsider, relatively speaking. Like most politicians in the Philippines, Duterte comes from an influential family — his father was an attorney and a former governor of what used to be Dávao province.

You may have thought you’d seen and heard the last from Imelda Marcos and her fancy footwear collection in the 1980s. But at age 83, she’s still in many ways the ‘iron butterfly’ of the Philippines and she’s running for reelection in the Philippine midterm elections on Monday — and though she’s just one member among 222 in the Philippine House of Representatives, she’s a ‘shoe-in’ for reelection.

That’s not just all — her son, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr., the namesake of her late husband, Ferdinand Marcos, the leader of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, is a first-term senator in the Philippine Senate, elected in 2010 to a six-year term for the Partido Nacionalista (NP, Nacionalista Party), which has withered in the days since it was the ironclad ruling party under his father. His mother has not been shy in recent years in boosting Bongbong as a potential presidential candidate in 2016.

In a country where political networks have long been controlled by generation after generation of the same political elite families, it’s not completely out of the question.

Her daughter, Imee Marcos, a former member of the House of Representatives from 1998 to 2007, has been governor of the Philippine province of Ilocos Norte since 2010, and she’s even more of a lock for reelection than her more famous mother, because she’s running unopposed. Ilocos Norte, one of 80 Philippine provinces, is a largely rural province that bears out toward the South China Sea on the far northwestern corner of Luzon island. But though it’s far from the heart of power in the Philippine capital of Manila, it’s the birthplace of the late former president and though the Marcos family may not be entirely popular, their patronage network gives them a political lock on many of the province’s offices.

Whether a Marcos returns to the Philippine presidency in 2016, it’s nonetheless a remarkable comeback for the family’s fortunes. First elected in 1965 and reelected in 1969, Marcos Sr. became increasingly authoritarian, instituting martial law in the Philippines that essentially left its democratic institutions in tatters. A staunch U.S. ally during the Cold War, many Philippines look to the 1970s as a golden era of high GDP growth, though it was an era of corruption, above all at the top of the government among Marcos and his family members.

The Marcos regime reached a turning point in August 1983 when the chief opposition leader to Marcos, Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino, Jr., was assassinated in the Manila airport upon his return to the country to contest Marcos’s policies directly. The economy sputtered, the regime’s international support (above all from the U.S. administration of Ronald Reagan) sputtered, and Marcos’s health sputtered, with Imelda taking an increasing role in state affairs. Marcos was finally ousted in 1986 during the ‘People Power’ movement that drove Ferdinand and Imelda into exile and Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, into power as the country’s first new leader in over two decades. Though Imelda had long been known for her extravagant lifestyle, she’ll forever be remembered for nearly 3,000 pairs of shoes that she left behind in Malacanang presidential palace upon their exile to Hawaii.

Her husband ultimately died in 1989, but Imelda returned to the Philippines in 1991, and she even ran for president in the 1992 election, though she finished in fifth place with barely over 10% of the vote. She aborted an attempted run in the 1998 presidential election, but returned to public life in 2010 with her election to the House of Representatives.

Far from chastened by her 1986 tumble from power, Imelda remains defiantly proud of her role in Philippine public life — and yes, even her shoes.

On her Facebook page (which shows that even Cold War-era autocrats can learn social networking), she even features a tantalizingly unrepentant photo album featuring ‘Imelda’s Shoes, Gowns and other fashion items,’ and other photo albums of her with her husband during their previous years in power.

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.